Plus, to amplify that, there are a lot more software hackers here than hardware hackers.
When Noyce died in 1990, the computer revolution had only barely crawled out of the cave. Silicon Valley and the US were in a recession; SV's financial might and reach was tiny compared to what it is today. It was only in the late 1980s that computer sales finally took off, global PC shipments were ~9 million in 1987, ~20 million by 1990, and 100 million by 1998.
Look at the tech industry in, say, 1988:
Microsoft $590m in sales. Intel $2.8b in sales. Apple was at $4b in sales. Those were three of the giants, and all of those figures were huge increases over just a few years prior.
GM's sales by comparison in 1988, were $110 billion. The tech industry was tiny 30 years ago.
On a side note, the 1988 Intel annual report opens with a very neat 20 year anniversary walk-through of their technology history:
https://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/report/history-1988-an...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8133479 has a few, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14650795 has a good one.
In his last interview, Noyce was asked what he would do if he were "emperor" of the United States. He said that he would, among other things, "…make sure we are preparing our next generation to flourish in a high-tech age. And that means education of the lowest and the poorest, as well as at the graduate school level."